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Talented artist seeks world change and she's only 17

Young artist Camille Gordon has the smarts, energy and burning desire to apply her gifts toward changing the world.

Young Brampton artist Camille Gordon, 17, with her painting "It Is Possible," which symbolizes a woman escaping an abusive situation. (Keith Beaty / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Daniel DaleStaff Reporter

Fri., March 12, 2010

Camille Gordon sits in the chapel of St. Augustine Secondary School in Brampton. Three of her fellow Grade 12 art students sit beside her.

They are here because Gordon invited them to an interview intended to be just for her, because Gordon wanted to share the attention, because that is how Gordon is. And they are surely promising 17-year-olds, intelligent and ambitious and idealistic. But there is no getting around the obvious.

“I just think that if anybody I’ve ever known is going to actually make some legit changes in the world,” says Chelsea Matthews, “it’s Camille. I don’t even know how she does everything she does.”

Running in the halls helps a bit. So does sleep deprivation. That she often gets three hours a night, sometimes none at all, concerns her mom, her teachers and her friends.

She shrugs off their worries. She is learning, she says at her church after school, how to say no — but she will not say no too often. There are too many problems to be solved.

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“I want to do huge things,” Gordon says.

She says it, fittingly, with a paintbrush in her hand. An activist with a sketchpad, she hopes to make a difference through art — and, also, through the achievement of her impossibly long list of art-related and non-art-related goals. Asked to share it while sitting in the chapel, she says, with a laugh, “I don’t want to waste your time.”

Gordon speaks with her whole body; in her mannerisms and her ever-present smile, she calls to mind Pinball Clemons. She also shares Clemons’ audacity.

She wants to have five pieces displayed at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She wants to create a record label for artists who promote positive messages. She wants to create a youth fashion line that is “eco-friendly, cost-effective, fashion-forward.”

Deeply religious and active in church charitable efforts, she wants to run programs for prisoners. She’d like to be a UN ambassador. (“See what I mean?” Matthews whispers, wide-eyed, at this point.) She is thinking about getting involved in politics.

Gordon, who has an academic average of 93 per cent, is gifted technically. But it is the sophistication of her mind that make her a once-in-a-lifetime art student, says St. Augustine art and design teacher Chris Chisholm. He says he feels like Wayne Gretzky’s coach.

“I don’t want to give you too much of a sound bite, but you get a wunderkind every once in a while. And she’s the one,” Chisholm says.

He adds: “There’s so much thought in her symbolism. She’s become a really great storyteller — because she applies her beliefs into everything. She doesn’t just draw or paint pictures; she tells stories, and they’re all deeply meaningful stories. She preaches through her paintings. This is how she reaches people ... and she’s 17! What’s amazing is that what’s in her head is way beyond a 17-year-old.”

What’s in her head depends on the hour of the day. Born in the Netherlands Antilles to Jamaican parents, she thinks about African and Caribbean history and identity. Accustomed to being an outsider, having attended nine schools after she came to Canada at age 6, she thinks about the marginalized.

In Gas Mask, one of her portfolio pieces, she creates a gas mask out of smaller images of global ills such as pollution and war. For much of the past month, she was consumed with Haiti. The fundraising art auction she proposed, held last weekend at St. Augustine, raised more than $2,000 — about $800 of which came from her work. And late last year, after she spearheaded a collection drive for a local shelter for abused women, she painted It Is Possible, a work that depicts a mother of uncertain ethnic origin fleeing abuse in a rowboat.

“It was very important that this woman look like a woman of many backgrounds,” she wrote in a note that accompanies the painting in her portfolio, “because this is a universal struggle.”

Her art, she says, “is social commentary for people to think about. It’s something that can inspire conversation for years, for years. I’m just going to show you something.” She points to a painting of hers she has leaned against the chapel wall. “This guy has a seed, right? Everything that we do in art, it’s seeds in people’s lives. The message, it can go in, and maybe they’ll think about it a week later. You never know when it will sprout.”

She hopes to hone her talents next year at the Ontario College of Art and Design or Sheridan College. After that, all bets are off.

“I have time to figure it out,” she says, then smiles. “But sometimes I feel like I don’t have any time.”

Do you know a Dreamer and Doer we should profile? Please send us an email at vlu@thestar.ca

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